While rival manufacturers flooded CeBIT with their Z77 motherboards, EVGA has been rather low key and only today decided to give us a look at what it's preparing for next's month's Ivy Bridge launch. Seen below is one high-end LGA 1155 board EVGA is currently working on. There's no name to go with the image (best guess is Z77 FTW) but plenty of specs can be identified like, well, the Ivy-ready LGA 1155 socket, four DDR3 memory slots, 10-phase power, two 8-pin power connectors to 'feed' the processor plus two 6-pin PCIe plugs catering to graphics cards, a PCIe bridge chip (likely made by PLX), and five PCI-Express x16 slots (at least two should be PCIe 3.0) providing SLI and CrossFireX capabilities.

EVGA's incoming motherboard also includes PCIe disable switches, a debug LED, an angled 24-pin ATX power connector, four SATA 6.0 Gbps and four SATA 3.0 Gbps ports, Gigabit Ethernet, an undetermined number of USB 3.0 ports, Power, Reset and Clear CMOS buttons, 7.1 channel audio, and it seems even a Thunderbolt port. Now where's that 'Like' button?

That makes three manufacturers announcing Z77 motherboards supporting thunderbolt connectivity, Intel, MSI, and now EVGA. Could Asus be far behind? Would be nice to see it at least on the Asus Maximus V Extreme, but so far no word on the board from Asus.

This is exactly what I would want for a F@H/Cruncher board. I can throw both my 460s, 550Ti and 440 on this board and put in a 2500K or something and have a beastly machine that could literally replace all 3 towers at my work.

Is that a PLX chip instead of an nvidia? Bold eVGA, but I guess that is what they have to do since nVidia doesn't have a PCI-E 3.0 switch, but that also leads me to believe that all of these slots are PCI-E 3.0, if they were 2.0 eVGA would have gone with the nVidia switch solution for sure.

That makes three manufacturers announcing Z77 motherboards supporting thunderbolt connectivity, Intel, MSI, and now EVGA. Could Asus be far behind? Would be nice to see it at least on the Asus Maximus V Extreme, but so far no word on the board from Asus.

Click to expand...

I second that! what is Asus thinking, leaving out thunderbolt.. does it eat up PCI-E lanes?

Is that a PLX chip instead of an nvidia? Bold eVGA, but I guess that is what they have to do since nVidia doesn't have a PCI-E 3.0 switch, but that also leads me to believe that all of these slots are PCI-E 3.0, if they were 2.0 eVGA would have gone with the nVidia switch solution for sure.

Click to expand...

correct no more NV200 chip. They are now using PLX and they would be behind the times if they aren't PCI-E 3.0.

This is to add power to the PCIe lanes when multiple cards are installed. Typically the PCIe is powered via the 24-pin, and drawing 300 W for four cards via hte 24-pin can lead to killing the PSU, or other unimpressive damage. MAny cards power ram and other things via PCIe power delivery.

There has been instances in the past of boards blowing with even just 3x HD4890 installed. The fix to avoid that was to solder a line form molex to the backside of the board directly to PCIe power, and EVGA eve nreleased an add-on part that you placed in the PCIe slot to provide more power. The board has dual six-pin plugs, one for hte upper PCie slots, and one for the lower ones.

If these sort of things weren't needed, they'd not be there, so if you install more than two cards in any system, be sure to look for a power connector like that on the board you use!

This is to add power to the PCIe lanes when multiple cards are installed. Typically the PCIe is powered via the 24-pin, and drawing 300 W for four cards via hte 24-pin can lead to killing the PSU, or other unimpressive damage. MAny cards power ram and other things via PCIe power delivery.

There has been instances in the past of boards blowing with even just 3x HD4890 installed. The fix to avoid that was to solder a line form molex to the backside of the board directly to PCIe power, and EVGA eve nreleased an add-on part that you placed in the PCIe slot to provide more power. The board has dual six-pin plugs, one for hte upper PCie slots, and one for the lower ones.

If these sort of things weren't needed, they'd not be there, so if you install more than two cards in any system, be sure to look for a power connector like that on the board you use!

Like the ASUS ROG boards have... the ability to turn off PCI-E slots so that you can boot the PC with a card in the slot but not run that card.

Nice for bench testing and have 2-3-4 cards on a water cool loop it is really nice. you can test one or two or 3 or 4 cards with just a flip of a switch... otherwise you would have to drain a loop or remove cards...